Tag: stop dieting

Gaining Weight on A Low Calorie Diet

So, you’ve been restricting calories to lose weight. For whatever reason, perhaps because you have an eating disorder, because you think you need to look a certain way to wear a bathing suit, or because the media and our culture have forced you to look upon yourself with distaste and wish for something better.  You’ve googled what to do and low-calorie diets and meal plans come up immediately.  “If energy in is less than energy out and the pounds will melt right off!” the articles say.

Maybe that was you 1 year ago, and you tried the diet, and it worked! But then you couldn’t maintain the restrictive lifestyle (because who could??) so the weight came back on. Then you tried again. and again. Now you’re restricting your calories under the façade of a “diet” just like you did before but this time you are noticing that you’re gaining weight!! Why the fuck is this happening??

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your metabolism @you

Well let me tell you – honey, your metabolism is mad.

When you attempt to lose weight quickly with low calorie meal plans, sure you lose some fat, but you ALSO lose muscle.  Your muscle mass is the most important factor that keeps your metabolic rate high.

Let’s say before you started dieting you were able to maintain your weight easily on 2700 calories a day. (These numbers are just examples). Then you go on your first low-calorie diet and lose 10 pounds quickly. While that rapid weight loss is initially encouraging it is not as fantastic as you may think.  You see, those 10 pounds include muscle loss.  So after a few weeks when life gets in the way and the diet is no longer sustainable, the weight comes back on AND your metabolic rate has dropped from 2700 to 2300 because of the muscle loss. With each new diet your metabolic rate decreases even more until your maintenance calories are lower than your diet calories – hence why you will eventually gain weight on low calorie diets.

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Unfortunately, this is a common problem and one of the reasons why the diet industry is an evil multi-billion-dollar industry. You see when these low-calorie meal plans work initially, people then blame themselves when they aren’t able to sustain them.  Then they continuously attempt to recreate the results of the first time but every time you force starvation onto your body through the guise of a “diet” you are furthering metabolic damage. This is also why when the weight comes back on eventually, you gain more than you started with. It’s not your fault, it’s the lies of diet culture that “innocently” suggest unsustainable and dangerous meal plans on people desperate for a quick fix.

So, you’re in a metabolically suppressed state commonly known as “starvation mode” – what do you do? Well the first step is obviously to STOP low calorie diets.  When I was stuck in this situation the only thing that worked for me was to eat eat eat until my metabolism caught up with me. No, your metabolism is not “broken,” I promise you that is impossible. Yes, I gained he weight back to where I was before I ever attempted my first diet… but I’m so much happier loving myself in this body than I ever was torturing myself in my calorie restricted body.

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment was a study done by Ancel Keys in the late 1940s to study the effects of famine on war torn countries in Europe post World War Two.  Besides fulfilling its intended purpose – the study also ended up shedding the first light on how dieting and food restriction effects the human body.

Here is an overview of how the experiment worked:

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The subjects were all men.  First, they were studied under a 12-week control period in which they were fed a standard diet of 3200 calories.  During this time their psychological and physiological states were measured in order to determine each subject’s baseline condition.  At this phase each man was at their natural weight, which they all maintained on the control diet they were fed.

The next phase was the starvation period. For the following 24 weeks all of the men’s diets were cut by approximately half to 1570 calories per day.  It was during this phase that the behavior of the subjects began to change drastically.  They all began presenting symptoms that we commonly associate with chronic dieters or anorexia sufferers today.  Some of the symptoms observed included:

  • A decrease in strength and energy
  • Apathy towards everything except for food
  • A sudden and intense interest in food displayed through reading cookbooks for fun and to stare at the pictures
  • They took advantage of being allowed to chew gum by chewing packs and packs of it per day, and they guzzled coffee and water to stave off feelings of hunger
  • They became irritable around meal times
  • Many men became depressed
  • They lost weight (obviously)
  • Their heart rates decreased
  • They felt dizzy
  • They felt lethargic
  • They were constantly cold
  • Almost all subjects experienced body dysmorphic disorder and were unable to recognize how much weight they had actually lost

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The next phase of the experiment was the recovery period.  The men were split into four subgroups and each group ate a different caloric intake to recover from the symptoms of starvation.  The first group ate 1970 calories, the second 2370 calories, the third 2770 calories, and final the fourth ate 3170 calories.  Even with the increase in calories all of the men were still left feeling hungry or starving.  These increased intakes were not helping and specifically the men in the lowest group were not feeling better AT ALL.  In light of this discovery Ancel Keys decided to add 800 calories to each groups intake.  Eventually he observed that the only factor helping these men recover was providing them way more food than he initially thought would be necessary.  He concluded that a person needs at least 4000 calories a day to recover and rebuild their strength.

After the recovery period was over the men were free to eat whatever they pleased, but Keys continued to observe a small handful of them.  He observed that most subjects continued to eat thousands and thousands of calories a day (12,000+ in some cases) for many months.  Many subjects reported to have an unending, insatiable, hunger months after the experiment ended.  As the subjects allowed themselves to re-feed through eating to their extreme hunger, their metabolisms began to heal, their strength returned, and many of the symptoms of starvation began to vanish.  Although to the layman it may appear that these men were massively “overeating” it became extremely evident that their bodies requires this seemingly inordinate amount of food to fully heal all of the damage.

On average the men regained their weight back to what it had been previously plus 10%.  You may identify this as an overshoot.  With unlimited food and unrestricted eating eventually their weight plateaued and about nine months later all of them were back to the weight they had been at the very beginning of the experiment.  This is one of the first documented and analyzed cases of a body’s “set point.”  Despite the original fear that all of this unrestrained eating would cause infinite and exponential weight gain, that proved to not be true.  This experiment demonstrated that over eating and starvation induced hunger only presented as long as a body was below its set point.

And that was the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.  It’s fascinating because just a cursory analysis of the study demonstrates how insanely harmful caloric restriction is on the human body. As you may note, all of the symptoms that the men experience in the starvation phase are eerily similar the symptoms felt by eating disorder sufferers and chronic dieters.  Sadly, most people who struggle with a disordered relationship to food today are often eating even less than the subjects of this study were.  A typical dietary recommendation for people seeking to lose weight is often a caloric total lower than the 1,580 calories the study subjects ate.  It is important to recognize that these “dietary guidelines” are dangerously low, unsustainable, and unrealistic amounts that should not be practiced.

Furthermore if you are stuck trying to recover from yo-yo dieting, binging and purging, restrictive eating, or any other disordered relationship to food this study gives you an excellent blue print for how to recover.  This was the science that I read when I decided to go all in on recovery using the Minnie Maud method.  This science validates that method of recovery (and now so does my own lived experience with it).

Please feel free to watch my video below for a synopses of the information above along with an outline of my own experience and my results from using this method to recover from anorexia.

How To Stop Counting Calories

There was a point in my life where I figured I would just be stuck counting calories forever, resigned to a life of sadness and disordered behavior.  However, this proved to be untrue as I transitioned from a religious calorie counter to an intuitive eater – and you can too.

When you stop counting calories, you start enjoying and experiencing your food for its texture and flavor instead of as just a number.  Eating becomes pleasurable when you aren’t constantly measuring, calculating, tracking, and obsessing over the food on your plate.  You’ll open up space in your brain to focus on things that actually matter.  You’ll be able to start eating intuitively by creating a stronger relationship to your body’s cravings and the food you eat.  Obsession with food will fall by the wayside.

The truth is, no matter how accurate you think your calculations are using your BMI, TDEE, BMR, etc. to calculate the right amount of calories for you – there is no way to truly know as every single body is different.  More to the point, without going crazy it is completely impossible to accurately know the calories of every food you eat.  Remember, all a calorie is is a unit of energy and our bodies NEED energy to live.  So here are some tips to stop counting calories forever.

GET RID OF CALORIE TRACKERS
This is a big one. I tracked all of my calories on “My Fitness Pal” but there are many others like it.  Cronometer, Lose It, Fat Secret, etc.  These apps were built to count calories so the best first step for a life without this burden is to get rid of them!  If you aren’t using an app than get rid of whatever device you use to track the numbers.  A notebook, planner, journal, or word document.  Delete it, burn it, or have a friend drive 20 miles away and throw it in a dumpster.  Getting that out of your life is a crucial first step.

GO OUT TO EAT AT RESTAURANTS
Most restaurants are impossible to gauge to calories for because you don’t know everything that goes into the food preparation. It helps to make sure you are with a friend or family member that can keep you distracted from trying to break down and calculate the meal components.  If you are financially incapable of dining out, that’s alright – just have a friend or family member cook a meal for you without telling you what is in it.  This is essentially the same concept.  You are looking to let go of the tightly wound control you have to maintain while counting calories by letting go of the control over food prep.

BLOCK OUT NUTRITION LABELS
Take a sharpie and cover them up so that you can’t look at them obsessively. Go grocery shopping in bulk bins or for items that don’t have nutrition labels on them at local shops of farmers markets.  Pick food for flavor and not for numbers.

HAVE FAITH YOURSELF TO EAT INTUITIVELY, BUT BE PATIENT
We are all born knowing how to eat. Your body knows what it needs and it is not trying to sabotage you.  It loves you and want to keep you alive, return the favor to it.  Eating intuitively takes practice but it is completely achievable for all of us since it is the way we are supposed to eat.  Remember that it will take time as well because you are breaking a very bad habit – and habits are not broken overnight.

If any of these steps seem impossible or overwhelming than feel free to take it slow.  I know how daunting and unreasonable these may seem – but if you implement these tactics into just one meal a day at first, and then slowly increase, you will eventually get there.  Take it from a girl who used to count the calories in gum – you can do this!